AMD wants to woo China with 64 bits

WESTERN FIRMS want a slice of China. A country with over a billion people most of whom do not have access to a PC is a potential market that has technologists in the US and Europe salivating over their dim sum.

As AMD executive vice president Dirk Meyer concedes, the Chinese market is a "huge opportunity", but cracking it is obviously no straightforward business.

Both Intel and AMD have established bridgeheads in the People's Republic, each taking its own route, but there's no point, said Meyer, in either of them treating such a huge opportunity as a single homogenous market.

On one point Meyer is very clear. He claims the x86 architecture is "appropropriate for every market in the world". This, of course, is by virtue of its long-establiushed history and the consequent expertise developed for the platform over generations.

And Meyer continually rejected our assertion that the Chinese market may be viewed differently, to the point, in fact, where he became quite agitated.

Is a high-powered, 64-bit and inevitably expensive chip really appropriate for a country, 80 per cent of whose inhabitants exist in conditions that most westerners would consider below the poverty line, we wondered.

Meyer argues, of course that it is, pointing to the community of some 200 million Chinese who enjoy a consumer lifestyle and enjoy the benefits of PC-dom.

AMD's 64-bit chips offer value in the server space, he argues, and on the desktop and in the home why shouldn't Chinese consumers want the highest performing chippery they can buy, just like their western counterparts.

The chipmaker is engaged in a project to bring PC access to 50 per cent of the world's population by 2015. The 50/15 initiative, he reckons, will breed a new class of consumer. Through partnerships with local companies and using alternative revenue generating modles such as subscrption services, whereby, say a local telecom company offers a Pc for rent along with a phone line, AMD reckons it can help bridge the gaping digital divide.

Our repeated suggestion that a territory such a China might benefit from a lower-powered, lower cost kind of chip eventually made Meyer hot under the collar. In the mindset that insists performance is king and that new chips must flow from the foundries every few months that are quicker and more powerful than those that went before it is tantamount to heresy.

But from what we know China - and although it is just over the Taiwanese Straits from where we sit now, it may as well be a million miles away -the country will want to develop its own operating systems rather than rely on Microsoft offerings.

It is also engaged in trying to build its own microprocessors, a possiblity that Meyer cannot rule out. "Never say never," he said. µ